Seduced And AbandonedFinancial times

PlotBugsy writer James Toback and his friend Alec Baldwin pitch, prod and provoke their way around Cannes in the hope of pulling back the curtain on film financing and Hollywood's inner workings.

Review

James Toback and Alec Baldwin’s flippant film-financing documentary excels only when its starry interviewees are on show. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain are stand-outs, dishing out behind-the-curtain quips about how films are really made — hint: it’s not all about the art — while Baldwin and Toback pitch an Iraq-set remake of Last Tango In Paris to a series of bemused execs during a ten-day jolly around Cannes. Fitfully amusing but far from definitive on an increasingly thorny issue, this HBO doc is fun but forgettable.

VerdictJollied up with some fun anecdotes from Hollywood's great and good, this is entertaining, if hardly hugely revelatory stuff.